So, Brexit is something that hasn't been in the news cycle for a while — certainly not in tech news. But it's still a thing that's happening — the UK is set to "leave" the European Union in March of next year. With that, as you probably can imagine, there's a ton of legal matters that need to be settled. The status of EU citizens that live and work in the UK is among them.

The British Home Office is developing an app to make it super-easy for the affected people to apply for a "settled" status in the UK. All they'd need to do is answer a few questions, take a selfie of themselves, and scan the NFC chip in their passports. The data is sent directly to the Home Office and is to be processed in two weeks' time for each person.

But, as you can probably guess, to scan a passport, you'd need an NFC chip in your own device.

Here's where the Home Office is met with a bit of a hurdle, one might say. Apple's iPhones do have NFC chips in them — they've had them since the iPhone 6 era. But these are completely locked away from 3rd party access. Apple only uses NFC for its proprietary Apple Pay service and has opened limited access to it for third-party developers who use its Core NFC framework.

As you probably know, iPhones are in the hands of a huge chunk of people. In the UK, it's estimated that about 50% of smartphone owners are on iOS. The Home Office's app does not work with iPhones, though, because it doesn't follow the Core NFC framework — it's just too limited for what it needs to do with the passport data, presumably. The Office continues to negotiate with Apple and the UK's Home Secretary Sajid Javid even made a trip to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino. The hopes were that Apple would expand Core NFC a bit when it launches iOS 12.1, but that didn't happen.

Apple's iPhones do have NFC chips, but iOS won't let just about anyone to access it

Android users, on the other hand, will mostly have no issues with the process. It is stated that only "very old" Android devices or cheap, entry-level phones (obviously, the ones that have no NFC) won't be able to run the app properly. Also, there are still a few people in the UK that are on Windows or BlackBerry phones — those are out of luck as well.

The good news is that one can do the application process by either borrowing someone else's Android phone, or by physically posting their passport to the UK Visa and Immigration Service. They can still answer the questionnaire digitally, via a computer. Home Office will be setting up computer stations at 56 local libraries for those that don't have a PC at home.

It is also worth noting that the Dutch government has also requested NFC access to Apple's iPhones way back in July. The Netherlands has its own apps to make dealing with bureaucracy easier, but, again, some features do need the use of NFC.

So, as we are getting more modern and more mobile, the use of NFC is popping up once again. Maybe, at some point, Apple will give in? Hey, they just put a USB Type-C port on an iPad, we can dream!

Oh please spare me that bs Leo. The only reason their nfc is locked down is because of Apple Pay. You're locked in like the rest of your moronic sheep. Respect Apple's rules like they're some f*cking deity? You iSheep are pathetic.

Thank you for having the guys to say it. Because Leo the Lion sheep will never criticize Apple doe anything.
Having said that, NFC when used for payments just can't be open to anyone.
But having said that, all Android dev's have apps thatbisng NFC and it causes no problem with Andeoid/Google Pay, Samsung Pay or any banks that also offer pay apps.
This is just Apple being Apple.
Apple Pays uses Tokenization made by MasterCard. It was not developed by Apple and nor was NFC.
This is just Appe being Apple and the sheep being the typocal sheep.
It's just like Trump supporters. Even when Trump is blatantly wrong.

I am confused, how is this a problem for Windows Phone users? I have an Android (Axon 7-rooted and on Pie via Treble) at the moment, but I have a number of Windows devices (Lumia's 928, Icon, 1520, 950, 950 XL (running Windows 10 on ARM), Alcatel Idol 4s, and an HP Elite X3) and all but the Idol 4s have an NFC chip and I used them for a variety of reasons/uses during my use of the devices (the Elite and the 950 xl are my daily drivers yet, the Android is purely for testing purposes). This included payments, NFC ring, a variety of automation via NFC, and an NFC door lock. Only Apple is the dumb company that refuses to acknowledge that their customers can do a variety of things if they had access to NFC.

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